Moving the Beam

On Thursday, January 25, I’ll be in conversation with Clare Beams at Riverstone Books in Pittsburgh (Squirrel Hill location). If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there! You can also find Heading North on Wendy J. Fox’s list of 15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Winter.

I came to weaving in a haphazard way, without any models among people I actually knew, and with an impatience I have both inherited and constructed. The first warp I put on my first loom, a small rigid heddle model, I put on backwards. Luckily, I’m not the first person to do so, and I found a solution online to salvage the circumstance, which is to say the yarn and the project. The only costs were time, a little wonkiness in the tension, and my pride at having fumbled the first go.

Weaving, more than any of my other fiber-related hobbies, has the greatest costs. A loom—whether small or large—costs something (unless you’ve got great luck or generous weavers in your life), and a loom eats yarn, fast. Yarn that goes farther—yarn which is finer, which might be as fine as thread, as fine as a hair, so fine you can’t see it except with your fingertips—takes more time: more time to thread through the shafts, more time to weave. The objects that save a bit of time—spool racks, warping wheels—add the kind of cost and storage space that aren’t beginner-friendly.

But even if you do buy every gadget and aid there is, one thing that pretty much everyone who makes things by hand in the 21st century agrees on is this: if you’re interested in speed above all else, you’re probably not making things by hand in the first place. You do things this slow and deliberate way on purpose. You take pleasure in the pains of it, the way each small action accumulates.

Except when you screw it up.

The second warp I put on my floor loom, I forgot to bring the yarn over the back-beam. What that means for people who don’t weave is that unless I undid hours of work, I wouldn’t be able to weave it at all. (And because I was inexperienced, all of that work was taking me proportionally more time—and more back-ache because of my weird contorting around my too-large loom in a too-small space. Just a disaster, all around.)

I did what has become second nature: I took to Instagram to document my error and bewail my fate.

Within two minutes, two long-experienced weavers pointed out that I could actually remove the back beam, slide it under the warp, and screw it back into place. Nothing had to be undone, except a pair of bolts, easily replaced. Five minutes later, I was weaving.

There are lots of things to take from this as a writer, the first being don’t panic. There are few creative failures that really merit the level of wailing I was feeling in my heart.

A second is perhaps the most important: again, it’s okay to find help. And, as I discovered, most people really do want to help, and they’ll offer, freely. The world is full of people both wise and kind, and it’s not as hard as one might think to find them. (But you have to let people know you need that help. It helps if you can laugh about it a little, too.)

A third is that you can just move the beam.

In writing, change is so much easier, mechanically, than it is in any other creative medium. We writers can simply click open a new document. We can yank out supporting beams of plot and character and put them somewhere else for a while, and though we might feel a certain kind of collapse internally about it, such a move doesn’t actually make the rest of the words slide from their lines into a pile, as though someone has upended several boxes of refrigerator poetry magnets. Barring catastrophic computer failure—back up your work, friends!—there is no writerly equivalent of accidentally chipping off your sculpture’s nose, and that’s such a relief.

Some treasures:

Rebecca Makkai spoke in her recent newsletter about visiting Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West and discovering that one of the things Wright demanded was that some window-glass be cut around the protruding edge of a potted plant, rather than moving the modestly sized plant a few inches. Makkai turned this consideration into a metaphor for writing, which I’ll let you read at the link above. A different reaction to moving the beam, so to speak.

Above, some actual treasures! Recently, I visited The Morgan Library & Museum for the first time. These images are from a particular collection of rare, old Bibles, and the workmanship of these things will never not captivate me. I am particularly intrigued by the embroidered Bibles and Psalm-books.

An Event & A Whole-Hearted Reading Recommendation

Next week, on 1/25, I’ll be in conversation with the incomparable Clare Beams at 7 p.m. at Riverstone Books (Squirrel Hill location) in Pittsburgh, PA. I cannot tell you what a dream it is to be doing an event for Heading North with Clare, whose work I love and whose second novel, The Garden, is forthcoming this spring. Years ago, I wrote the following at the now-retired blog on my website, which turned out to be about Clare and her gorgeous writing, as you will see:

“Back in 2012, when I was still living in Wyoming, I was reading a newly arrived issue of One Story, a story called "World's End," and it had done everything I love in fiction, all at once. It was a story about a young architect, overmatched by his project and facing a beautiful storm of ambition and desire. The historical setting, the enormity of the task before the young architect, the incongruity of love and obsession, the tender and wondering treatment of the setting that struck me in my heart of hearts somewhere between Andrea Barrett and Annie Dillard—it was a short story that felt like it was made for me, rather than one I admired through the glass.

“As the architect turns over in his mind the challenge of the land and his new infatuation with his employer's daughter, the two things merge:

“The sentences move so easily between exterior and interior and of course, exactly so, because that's where the story lives.

“I loved this story, for its wet green world, its familiar difficulties made strange and stunning...and then I forgot about it, the issue itself loaned or given or absorbed into the ether. In the midst of teaching four or five classes a semester that only very seldom had to do with creative writing, committee work, and then applying for a new job, moving 2000 miles, teaching more classes, and so on, it crept away from me, and I was all the poorer without it. I hadn't noted the author, hadn't noted anything except that brief burst of happiness I forgot to capture somehow, sure I could do it later, so profligate with this little gift from the universe.

“Fast-forward to August 2018, to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where I had the absolute good fortune to be in a workshop led by Josh Weil. Our workshop fellow was Clare Beams. I'd managed to read Weil's work before going to Vermont, but beyond the story Josh very thoughtfully shared with the workshop before the conference started, I hadn't read Clare's work before (because I live under a rock, obviously). But I attended her craft talk, and listened to her read, and was just generally rapt by all she said and the kind, eloquent way she did so, so I bought We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories (Lookout Books 2016).

“I found "World's End." It's the second story in the collection, and I'd feel like an utter numpty about it except I'm just so happy to have found it again and to learn it was written by Clare Beams. The whole collection is as absorbing, as richly made as "World's End," and in a few deft sentences, these stories will land you in places you did not know they could go.”

All this is to say: if you’re in the area, I’d love to see you in Pittsburgh. It’s going to be a wonderful conversation.